When surfing the social media feeds of progressives, finding comparisons of Trump to Hitler, or of our government to Germany in the 1930’s seems inevitable. On the surface, these comparisons might seem apt. There is a highly authoritarian streak to this administration, and the movement behind it is undoubtedly fascist in its outlook. They’re doing their best to protect police forces that commit violence against unarmed civilians. They’ve authorized taking property from people who haven’t been convicted of crimes. Using children as hostages to deter immigrants and asylum seekers is perhaps the most cruel and recent example.
However, Trump isn’t Hitler, despite some similarities. While both encouraged palace intrigue within their inner circles and wanted people who were above all else loyal, they differ at some fundamental levels. Both movements were intensely nationalistic, xenophobic, and racist. Both encouraged violence, though the violence in Germany was far worse. Both used the power of government to target minorities.
Trump lacks a clear vision (besides “We’re America, bitch.”) He is perhaps more pragmatic in his lack of underlying principles, and lacks micromanaging intensity of the German authoritarian. While some German churches supported Hitler and the Nazis and some did not, and the Nazis did make some use of religion in their propaganda, it wasn’t at its core a religious fundamentalist movement. The defining characteristic of Trump’s most vicious base is its religious fundamentalism, most notably white evangelicals.
Beyond this, the Democratic Party still exists. There are still elections and a free press. The lower levels of the federal judiciary are still nominally issuing rulings against the administration. There’s no Reichstag fire, no martial law, and political violence is still relatively rare. What makes the US like Russia is that they have most of these things too, and yet it still doesn’t matter.
Russia is a corrupt oligarchy with one man at its head. Their elections don’t matter; Putin and his party will win regardless. The Duma and the courts are effectively a rubber stamp for Putin and the Oligarchs. Social policy is dictated by the Orthodox Russian Church and the oligarchs bankrolling their viewpoints. The Orthodox Church is 100% behind Putin in reward for him going along (mostly) with their social policies, and particularly those aimed at stomping out the Russian LGBT community.
At the same time, wealth inequality as a result of policies favoring the oligarchs has skyrocketed over the past 20 years. Russians with college degrees can’t find jobs that pay enough, and are either leaving, or finding work in places like the “Troll Farms” in Saint Petersburg. The middle class has shrunk to near nothingness.
The population, dazed and confused in an environment where no one can tell what is real-truth and what is the government truth, has sunk into wretched apathy. They live in a system where their votes don’t matter, nothing they do will change anything, and those few people capable of challenging the existing order have a habit of ending up dead. Chemical dependency on alcohol, tobacco, opiates, and other drugs is rampant, as people struggle with the hopelessness of their situation. Life expectancy has fallen, and continues to fall further below that of other industrialized nations, as drug dependency increases and wealth inequality takes away health care from most.
This is the where the U.S. is headed, and it is entirely by design. Let’s take a look at the various aspects of the United States today that make it clear that Russia is where we’re headed, and how Republicans and Trumpists have deliberately made this happen.
Oligarchy, Kleptocracy, and Wealth Inequality
One of the defining characteristics of Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union has been the oligarchy and kleptocracy that developed as former Soviet industrial enterprises were sold to oligarchs for pennies on the dollar. While Putin is no longer reliant on the oligarchs to stay in power the way he was in the early 2000’s, he is still better off keeping them happy than the general population. Indeed, Putin has used this relationship built on corruption and graft to become one of the richest men in the world, becoming both a parasitic and symbiotic relationship at the same time.
In the US, we are fast approaching the same levels of wealth disparity. The GINI coefficient is a widely accepted statistical measure of economic inequality. The US and Russia both rank among the world’s most unequal nations by this measure, and others.
We can see the effects at ground level, where economic and social mobility have nearly vanished. Millennials have less than a 50-50 chance of being better off than their parents; a first for any American generation. Minimum wage jobs don’t pay enough to meet rent in any state in the US, personal debt is skyrocketing, and student loan debt and interest is forcing the youngest generations to live with their parents. Wages themselves for people in the lower 4 quintiles have remained stagnant for decades, while cost of living has increased dramatically. Many young people are working 2 or 3 jobs plus “side hustles” and “gigs” to make ends meet.
While the Affordable Care Act slowed health care cost growth, it is expected to climb rapidly again after the end of penalties for failure to self-insure, and revocation of protections for pre-existing conditions. As a result, many forecasters anticipate a dramatic rise in medical bankruptcies.
This situation is the predictable result of decades of lowering personal income tax rates, and now the lowering of corporate tax rates. There is a clear inverse relationship between top marginal tax rates and wealth inequality, and also a correlation between social mobility and tax rates. The Republican adherence to supply side economics and Laffer Curve have been an abject failure. The Kansas experiment should have ended the belief in this fairy tale.
Who can say if the Republican oligarchs actually believe the fairy tale, however. They do know that it has made them much, much richer than they have been in a hundred years since the Gilded Age. When recession hits, it’s not going to look like the great recession. It’s more likely to look like Weimar Germany as the annual deficit hits nearly $2.5 trillion dollars per year, and the Federal government will struggle to suppress hyper-inflation and keep the population from starving.
It might be possible to reverse this shift in wealth. It might be possible to head off this upcoming with aggressively progressive tax rates and New Deal-style projects aimed at improving infrastructure and the social safety net. Now that Republicans have rigged the system such that they retain power regardless, the odds of such a strategy to reverse the destruction of the middle class are almost nil. It would cut into the wealth of the oligarchs and Republican leaders getting rich off the system, and none of them would ever allow that.
Instead, they will ignore the issue, or insist that young people are lazy and need to work harder to “pull themselves up by the boot straps.” Or blame it on immigrants taking their jobs. But they certainly won’t take the measures necessary (namely raising taxes) to prevent a demographic shift towards a more Russian model.
Pravda, Istina, and Vranyo
In Russian, there are two words for truth: pravda and istina. Americans are more familiar with pravda, which means the surface truth, which can be both subjective and infinitely malleable. Think Obi Wan telling Luke that Darth Vader betrayed and murdered his father; true… from a certain point of view. Istina is the concrete, universal, unalterable “real” truth; Darth Vader is Anakin Skywalker, and he is Luke’s father regardless of the name. There is also a third useful word in Russian that can help us understand where we are at, which is “vranyo” which, while not directly translatable, but can be thought of as “useful bullshit.”
The Russian use of all three can be seen in their invasion of the Crimean Peninsula. They used pravda to inflame anti-Ukrainian sentiments. They used vranyo to claim they didn’t shoot down Malaysia Flight 17 and that all those Russian soldiers were just ethnic Russian patriots in Ukraine. According to the Russian experts I have spoken with, most Russian civilians have come to regard istina as unknowable; impossible to separate out from all the pravda and vranyo. They have segregated themselves into groups: those who buy government provided pravda hook line and sinker, those who regard the real truth as something they cannot ever know and are thus willing to go along with things, and the very small percentage that are generally able to still tell istina from pravda and vranyo.
America is not so different from Russia. In the RAND report, “Truth Decay”, they note that there is a diminishing role of facts and data in American life. They noted four overarching trends:
- Increasing disagreement about facts and analytical interpretations of facts and data
- A blurring of the line between opinion and fact
- The increasing relative volume and resulting influence of opinion and personal experience over fact
- Declining trust in formerly respected sources of facts.
Political polarization has helped feed these phenomena. It does not help matters that Russia deliberately injected fake news designed to flame tension into targeted social media streams; indeed, their preparation of their own populace for the invasion of Ukraine was done similarly. Nor does it help matters that the administration’s base were the most avid consumers and disseminators of this pravda and vranyo.
Worse, the majority of Americans cannot tell the difference between real news and fake news, but they don’t know it. Indeed, nearly all Republicans believe that traditional media sources are “fake news”, in a stunning display of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Their paranoia about gays, Mexicans, Muslims, Hillary Clinton, etc… make them particularly susceptible to any conspiracy theory put to them via social media, no matter how far-fetched and easily disproven they are (see PizzaGate for details).
Americans are aware of the confusion, but feel powerless to do anything about it, or simply believe that they can tell what the truth is when others cannot. The result is a federal government that can convince their base of anything they want via proxies like Fox News, as long as it coincides with their existing world view (brown people and immigrants are bad), in order to generate any action they want. (e.g. Three year old Guatemalan children are drug mules for MS13 and deserve to be locked in cages.)
Most of the rest of the population is unable to discern the truth, and doesn’t care. The fraction that does learn the truth, and cares, is unable to do anything at all given they have no real power in any branch of government.
This situation differs from Russia only in the finer details. It’s only natural, given they used it on their people first, then exported it to a country ripe for such exploitation after two decades of Fox News indoctrination.
Potemkin Village Elections
The world knows that Russian elections are rigged. Election observers watch the same person vote over a dozen times, and no one cares. Video also shows people, including government officials, literally stuffing the box with handfuls of ballots. As a result, without forcing people to vote, turnout in Russian elections is very low. And why not? How people vote has zero impact in the election. Putin will be President, and his party will control the Duma.
Republicans in the US are only slightly subtler in how they rig elections. After the Gill decision, The Supreme Court has essentially made it impossible to systematically challenge political gerrymanders. As a result, even if Democrats win by a wide margin, they will still not end up winning legislatures at the state or federal level. In Virginia in 2017, Democrats won the popular vote by almost 10 points, and still ended up losing the House 51-49. In Wisconsin in 2012 Democrats won the popular vote 51-49, but lost the legislature 60-39 due to gerrymandering.
At the US House of Representatives in 2012, Democrats won the popular vote by 1.4 million votes, but lost the House by 234-201. Indeed, most pollsters think Democrats need to win by 7-8 percentage points, a landslide in modern time, just to have a 50-50 chance of taking back the house.
This is entirely intentional. North Carolina is another state that has been heavily gerrymandered in favor of Republicans. Rep. David Lewis, is a Republican who loudly bragged about the success of his gerrymandering efforts as part of the redistricting committee. “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with eleven Republicans and two Democrats,” Lewis said at the time.
While one might argue that certainly Democrats could do the same, the answer is they cannot do it nearly as effectively as Republicans based simply on mathematics and geography. In the end, only 1 in 10 House seats are actually competitive.
It’s also a truism that low voter turnout, especially by minorities and the poor favors Republicans. This results in the Republican party going to great lengths to suppress the vote through a number of factors. Voter ID laws are high on the list. Doing this in combination with closing down Department of Motor Vehicles offices (which issues valid government ID for voting…) in majority minority districts in Alabama was a stroke of Machiavellian genius, only made possible by getting the Supreme Court to effectively overturn the enforcement mechanisms of the Voting Rights Act.
Other methods for disenfranchising people likely to vote Democrat include frequent voter roll purges and preventing college students from voting in the state where they are going to school. The Supreme Court has upheld these, and with the retirement of Kennedy it is likely to green-light far more (and worse). Research shows that these efforts are effective at suppressing minority turnout. The mathematical result is another 2-3 points of advantage for Republicans in general elections.
The net result are elections where for the vast majority of people in the US in the vast majority of legislative races, it doesn’t matter how they vote. The issue has already been decided. It’s also effectively been decided who will end up controlling the legislature ahead of time, as surely as if the Russian Army showed up and personally stuffed the box with wads of pre-made ballots.
Elections are essentially just for show to make the world think better of us for nominally still being democracy, a Potemkin Village of electoral fraud.
The Parties of Putin and Trump
The United Russia Party has been the majority or super-majority party in Russia since 2004. It exists for one purpose: to support the administrations of Putin, or his brief, temporary successor Dimitry Medvedev from 2008-2012. It is the “party of power”, existing merely as an extension of the executive branch.
It has no coherent or stable ideology as a result. Instead, its policy positions in the moment are whatever Vladimir Putin’s positions are. In 2009 it proclaimed “Russian Conservatism” as it’s ideological position. Defined by Putin, this encompassed nationalism, making Russia great again, rejection of economic globalism, attacks on science and education, close ties with the Russian Orthodox Church, and fierce enmity towards LGBT people and feminists.
In the United States, it is hard to say what the Republican party stands for anymore. Once deficit hawks, they have slashed the tax base at Trump’s behest and left the US with a projected $1.2 trillion dollar annual deficit during an economic high-tide. Once the party of globalism and free trade, they have meekly gone along with Trump’s attacks on US allies and free trade. Political observers on both the left and the right generally agree; the Republican Party is now the party of Trump. Trump’s positions are mercurial and unpredictable, but Republicans will support his current position regardless of what it was 10 minutes ago, and Fox News will happily do the same. All of them will do their level best to pretend like their positions never changed.
In many ways, Republicans do not care if the public notices that they are now proclaiming we have always been at war with East Asia, because they know there is little that the public can do about it after they have so effectively bewildered the public with pravda and vranyo, and made it impossible for them to vote them out of office anyway.
So, what are the Trump administrations bedrock positions? Nationalism, making America great again, rejection of economic globalism, attacks on science and education, close ties with the white fundamentalist evangelicals, and fierce enmity towards LGBT people and feminists.
The result is a dynamic between the Trump Administration and Congress that closely resembles the relationship between Putin and the Duma, complete with a baseline Trump administration ideology that is essentially similar to that of Putin’s.
Religious Fundamentalism in Government
Perhaps no group in Russia loves Vladimir Putin more than the Russian Orthodox Church. In 2012 the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, called his 12 years of rule a “miracle of God.” Other religious leaders at the meeting heaped praise on the prime minister as well.
Similarly, Konstantin Malofeev is a Russian multibillionaire, devout Russian Orthodox, and described as “God’s Oligarch.” He has also been called “Putin’s Soros,” and has had audiences with the Pope for his giving to religious causes in Europe. He has also created a TV network called “The Orthodox Christian Fox News,” which is the fastest growing network in Russia. Malofeev’s praise for Putin and his relationship with the Church is effusive as well. “”We live now in Russia … a delightful period, a period of triumph of Christianity… President Putin is our leader … given to us by God.”
Putin, in return has given a great many gifts to the Church. He says all the right things, such as “Russia is ruled by God.” The anti-gay propaganda law has been lauded by Kirill (who compared same sex marriage to Nazi laws) and it is now illegal to offend the religious beliefs of anyone in Russia. The latter is, of course, being used to suppress both Putin and the Church’s enemies.
There is thus a symbiotic relationship between the religious oligarchs, the Orthodox Church, and Putin. The Church gets the social policies it wants, along with legal protection from any sort of criticism. Putin builds on his mystique and shores up his support. The oligarchs acts as power brokers who spreads his nationalistic brand of Christianity throughout Russia and Europe, while making themselves even richer.
The Russian Orthodox Church, Malofeev, and others have deep and longstanding relationship with fundamentalist leaders in the United States via the World Congress of Families, a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group headquartered in Rockford, Illinois. The board of the WCF includes Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage, and Apostle Dallin Oaks, the second highest ranking member of the Mormon Church. It also includes Alexey Komov, another billionaire oligarch aligned with Putin, Malofeev, and the Russian Orthodox Church.
It was no coincidence that the World Conference of Families surreptitiously went ahead and held their conference in Moscow in 2014. This was done somewhat on the sly, to avoid sanctions on Russia for invading Ukraine. In 2015, the WCF conference was held in Salt Lake City, Utah, where it was addressed by Mormon Apostle Russell M. Ballard. In attendance was Vladimir Mischenko, a close Putin ally who funded the conference to Moscow in 2014. The WCF also gave its “International Pro-Life Award” to Father Maxim Obukhov at the 2015 conference, who brought the event to Moscow in 2014.
The mainstream conservative embrace of Russia and Vladimir Putin didn’t happen overnight. In 2007, radical anti-LGBT activist Scott Lively was one of the first conservatives to praise Putin after going on a 50-city tour of Russia promoting anti-gay laws. Other anti-LGBT activists sung Russia’s praises after the country passed its draconian anti-gay LGBT laws. “Russians do not want to follow America’s reckless and decadent promotion of gender confusion, sexual perversion, and anti-biblical ideologies to youth,” Peter LaBarbera wrote.
By 2014, even mainstream conservative figures, such as Rush Limbaugh, were embracing Putin for militarism and social conservatism. Matt Drudge tweeted “Putin is the leader of the free world.” Sarah Palin gushed over his manliness in comparison with President Obama. “People are looking at Putin as one who wrestles bears and drills for oil. They look at our president as one who wears mom jeans and equivocates and bloviates.” In 2014 Rudy Giuliani praised Putin stating he, “makes a decision and he executes it, quickly. Then everybody reacts. That’s what you call a leader.”
The full buy-in from the Republican evangelical base, however, came when Franklin Graham fully endorsed Putin and his approach to LGBT people. ““n my opinion, Putin is right on these issues… he has taken a stand to protect his nation’s children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda… Isn’t it sad, though, that America’s own morality has fallen so far that on this issue – protecting children from any homosexual agenda or propaganda – Russia’s standard is higher than our own?” In 2015, Graham had a one-on-one meeting with Putin.
Other leaders of the religious right, such as Brian Brown and Rick Joyner have endorsed Putin. In 2017, Franklin Graham organized a conference on global Christian persecution that featured top religious leaders and activists from Russia and the United States. It also featured Vice President Mike Pence, who met with the Russian Orthodox Bishop Hilarion Alefeyev. Alefeyev also has ties with the WCF.
What is obvious here is that the Russian Orthodox Church would like for America to become more like Russia culturally, particularly with regards to LGBT people and women, and the relationship between church and state. Conversely, Evangelical Christians backing Trump, and even mainstream Republicans, would love to see the US become more like Russia. No gay marriage, bans on abortion, bans on “homosexual propaganda,” and a lack of separation of church and state; these are all things that American Evangelicals would love to import. They’re also in a tremendous position to do so given their remarkable access to the White House, and influence on members of Congress.
In both the US and in Russia, leaders there have effectively nationalized the dominant strains of Christianity in their countries as a tool to support the regime. At the same time, these Christian conservatives are coordinating their efforts to influence their respective governments as well, and serving as a conduit between Christian billionaires looking to shape their countries theologically and culturally.
Given the lack of effective opposition, it is hard to see how the US does not end up even more like Russia in this regard, given it is what everyone in power on both sides want.
Ideological Courts as Rubber Stamps
In Russia, the most important court to checking the power of the executive branch is the Constitutional Court, which decides (among other things) whether Presidential decrees abide by the constitution of the Russian Federation. The justices on this court serve 12 year terms, and are appointed by the President.
You can see where this goes horribly wrong. Putin, or his lackey Dimitry Mevedev, have been President for nearly 20 years. Everyone on the Constitutional Court is someone hand-picked by Putin or Medvedev to agree with them executive branch in all matters. In 2006 academics speculated that the Constitutional Court was the last bastion against Russia descending into authoritarianism. That time has long come and gone. Now, a Google search of “Constitutional Court Blocks Putin” yields no results showing that the Court has rejected Putin’s decrees in any meaningful way.
In short, Putin stacked the courts, and can do more or less whatever he wants. He can effectively rule by fiat, because the one court that would have the power to stop him never would, and he made sure of it.
Which brings us to the United States today. While the US has lifetime appointments to the courts, the one court capable of stopping the Trump Administration appear to be about to fall more or less under the President’s sway. The retirement of Justice Kennedy under a cloud of suspicion that he was forced out because of his son’s involvement with loans to Donald Trump via Deutsche Bank, leaves Trump with the ability to craft a solid 5-4 conservative majority on the courts. There’s also a strong likelihood he will get to make a third appointment to replace Ginsberg or Breyer, even if he loses the 2020 election. Should he win, it is essentially a certainty he will get that third appointment, and possibly a 4th.
The court appears ready to bend over backwards to accommodate the executive branch after its decision on the Muslim Ban, even if it has to tie itself in legal knots to do so. This session brought us the absurdity of it being an impermissible act religious discrimination by government officials to note the role of religion in the history of discrimination, but entirely permissible for the President to create travel bans targeting Muslims after making far more egregiously false and biased statements about Muslims. This eerily mirrors the Russian court system, where they do not rely on not recognize judicial precedent as a source of law when making decisions. This gives the courts there an immense amount of latitude to rule the way Putin wishes.
At a lower level Trump has also been packing the courts with marginally qualified ideologues at a record pace. In addition to being a rubber stamp for conservative executive orders, and a roadblock for any Democratic President in the future, the judicial philosophies of these judges are certain to exacerbate the problems of rigged elections, wealth inequality, and destruction of civil rights.
They are likely to sign off on gerrymandering and voter suppression, resulting in a government that looks less and less like the people of the country they theoretically represent. They are likely to sign off on laws designed to disadvantage workers and favor corporations, further worsening wealth inequality in the US. They are likely to erode civil rights protections for women and LGBT people, while giving religious conservatives a host of new tools to force through their social agenda by widening the scope and reach of Religious Freedom Restoration Act precedents. They are likely to shield the executive branch and churches from investigations into Russian meddling in the US political process.
Because the appointments are lifetime appointments, and because they rely on judicial precedent for decisions, the odds are that even if Trump loses the election in 2020, a conservative SCOTUS will make at least a decade’s worth of damaging decisions. Over that decade they will block most efforts by a democratic administration to undo the damage. Even after they are gone, judicial precedent means that their decisions will continue to make matters worse for at least a generation, if not two or three. It took 32 years to overturn Lochner v. New York, which ushered in the Gilded Age and eventually the Great Depression. It took 75 years to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson, which established the “separate but equal” doctrine as constitutional, with Brown v. Board of Education.
What’s Next?
In a better world, I would tell you that everything will revert to normal by 2021. Democratic norms will reassert themselves, rational people will be back in charge, and the trends we see above will begin to reassert themselves. In reality, none of the trends indicate this is true. Nothing in the literature looking at what happens to democracies in decline says that this what to expect. None of the things that would reverse these trends are likely to happen. Indeed, Republicans are doing everything they can to ensure that the things necessary to reverse these trends do not happen.
There is somehow a narrative that autocracies are inherently unstable. This is not true. While weak democracies and weak autocracies (i.e. ones with limited control over the population) are unstable, strong autocracies are remarkably stable, and particularly so when they have a solid (not necessarily majority) base of popular support. Russia, China, Cuba, North Korea; all of these autocratic states appear highly stable right now. As horrific as life in North Korea is, the regime there has hung on for almost 70 years. The US tried for 50 years to pressure Cuba’s government into collapse, without success.
There are certainly things that could be done to reverse trends, but they are probably functionally impossible because those actions would undercut the power of the party in charge. We could raise the top marginal rates on taxes, eliminate loopholes for businesses, raise the minimum wage to a living wage, and establish a much more progressive tax system in order to reduce wealth inequality. But Republicans would never allow that. Indeed, their devotion to supply side economics leads them to do the opposite, no matter the result of the failed experiment in Kansas.
We could expand voting rights, pass laws against gerrymandering, make general elections a federal holiday, etc. Alternately, a national proportional representation system like parliamentary governments use would also help ensure that people are actually represented and that their votes count for something. But that will not happen while Republicans are in control because it benefits them politically.
We could have stronger legal regulations and protections against fake news and foreign interference in US elections, but Republicans will not do anything because allowing it benefits them and helps keep them in power.
We could have a Supreme Court that would act as a backstop for democracy against the naked power grab now in play, but they have clearly swung in favor of Republican positions, including: voter suppression, gerrymandering, executive power, pro-business decisions, decisions against women and LGBT people, and decisions for religious fundamentalists who genuinely want to see the end of the world come to pass through their chosen President.
Even if we do elect a different President in 2020, Republicans are likely to retain control of the Senate, and the Supreme Court is likely to strike down many of the executive branches attempts to correct the things that have gone horribly wrong (and if you’re expecting judicial intellectual consistency, that’s a very big assumption after the last session). At the same time, conservative legal groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom will hammer away with impact litigation designed to tear down civil rights laws, and using the rubble to build case law that favors conservative Christian beliefs mirroring those in Russia.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt are Professors of Government at Harvard University who wrote the book, “How Democracies Die.” In it they observe that democracies only function so long as the parties involved play the game by the rules, and like it is a game. That is to say, like a baseball game where everyone plays according to agreed upon rules that affect both parties equally. It also requires the attitude from both parties that you win some, and you lose some, and if you win, you might lose the next one, and if you lose, you’ll have a chance to win the next one.
As of 2010, Republicans made the conscious decision that they weren’t going to play that game anymore. Instead, they would apply the logic used in “Ender’s Game” to resolving conflict: put your enemy down, and ensure that they never get back up. Using the baseball metaphor, it would be as if the team that won the first half of the double header changed the rules such that the winner (and only the winner) could use their bats as weapons, and then proceeded to bludgeon the entire opposition bullpen senseless.
Sure, you could still play the back half of the double header, and the losing team could still put 11 men on the field. But, with all their pitchers gone, the outcome of every game left in the series has already been effectively determined.
So, with a rigged political system, and an unrepresentative government what are the options for escape from this downward spiral? There aren’t a lot, and all of them are going to be extremely painful.
Perhaps the most likely one is a recession that collapses public confidence in Republican ability to handle the economy. This next economic downturn will probably be brutal. With the US tax base slashed by the Trump Administration and the deficit above $1.2 trillion in a boom economy, we could easily see the next recession result in $2 to $2.5T dollar annual deficits. This would be completely unsustainable and either require raising taxes in the middle of a recession (bad), or slashing government spending on things like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, rendering millions of elderly starving or destitute. In addition, such high deficits could set off a nasty round of inflation / currency devaluation. With deficits so high, the usual solution to a recession of stimulus and bailouts may not be possible. This is part of why Goldman-Sachs is downgrading the US economic outlook.
Without an economic collapse, however, Republicans and their base seem dead set on copying the Russian model for society, not the Weimar Republic collapse into Nazi Germany. Modeling Russia comes with all the amenities: Massive wealth inequality. A confused, apathetic populace unable to tell reality from propaganda. Single party rule and show-elections. A judiciary that is a rubber stamp for the ruling party. Life spans at the bottom of the developed world. Religious control over social policy. Draconian executive actions with no recourse. Severely degraded civil rights for women, minorities, and LGBT people.
From a Russian perspective, they’ve torn down their worst enemy and even made them more like themselves socially. They have destroyed the old alliances facing them, and turned their enemies against each other. Increasingly, it is becoming harder and harder to tell who, if anyone, actually won the Cold War.
The SCOTUS Event Horizon for the LGBT Movement
Stop for a moment. Imagine how bad it will be…